As the network research community considers design options for a future global network, we have come to realize that some of the original design decisions, while effective, were not the only way to go. In fact, we could have taken different forks in the road as we designed, and ended up in very different places, perhaps with a network that is equally effective at supporting a wide range of applications, but different in other ways. In this talk, I will identify a few of these alternate designs, and describe how the network they would induce would differ from what we see today. In doing so, I will try to illustrate both the nature of the design process and the variation in outcomes.
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